DIY: Make a Sinage

I am going to be at the Oddmall: Emporium of the Weird for the first time on November 19-29, 2016 at Everett Community College, Everett, WA, so in between making things to sell and packing everything up, I was trying to come up with ways to decorate my booth.

One of the things I definitely need is a signage. At first I thought I'd order one, get it all nice and professionally done but research told me that it could be pricey... and I did not really want to add more expenses to this venture. So my research turned into a DIY.

We had some leftover wood from a previous home project, so I gathered a few of those and started to gauge how big I want the sign to be. I settled on two planks, about a half a foot long, and made it three layers high.

I wanted the wood grain to show through so I chose the sides I wanted to be up front then started gluing the planks together. After that, I took some shims and used those in pairs and glued them at the back to hold the planks together (you know, just to make sure...).

Chose the pretty grains side and glued them side by side. The total heigh is worth three planks. I added shims as support on the back.

Next up was painting. There were so many color combinations to choose from. I could go with wood stain on white, wood stain on orange. White on black. Gray on white. Orange on Black. Orange on white. White on Orange. Black on Orange.

To test, I colored a couple of shims. I liked it but not as much as natural wood colors – I love wood colors with grains showing so I stained the wood with Dark Walnut stain instead.

Color and writing tests on shims

It's been rainy, more than usual, and that was not helping with drying time. The big storm of the century was supposed to have whirled through this weekend, which, thankfully, it did not. But it was cloudy and rainy still, so I left the wood to dry in front of the heater for a day.

While waiting, I looked up ways of aging the wood and I stumbled on Reality Daydream's video. She colored the wood first before staining it. I really liked how her aged wood looked, so I decided to go for it even though I've already stained my wood.

I chose blue, black, yellow and an off-white paint colors and painted the board randomly with this color combination. No premixing or anything. After it dried, I sanded it by hand then applied another coat of stain. It was perfect! I love, love, love how it turned out! Look at those colors. And the second coat of stain just made it look darker and richer.

For text, I decided to go with classic white to contrast with this rich background. Using a yellow pastel pencil, which was what I had on hand, I wrote OrangeJar.com in my loose, informal script and painted over that with white. Gorgeous. I love it.

But. Even though I love it now, the good news is, when I'm tired of this and want to try a different look, I can just sand or paint over everything and reuse the same materials!